Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Tuesday 18 July: Latin America specialist Brian Moorhouse passed away.
On Saturday 15 July Brian Moorhouse died. He was a British dealer, expert and philatelist specialised in the Latin American continent and the Caribbean from the 19th century to the 1940s.

Saturday 22 July: On new stamps of France: sculptures and gastron... Mediterranean nature.

A personal view on two issues - the EuroMed Postal of July and the Auguste Rodin commemorative of September - compared to former issues of France on the same topics or how Jersey Stamps treated nature through the bicentenary of the kaleidoscope.

The context was the tensions between French fishing companies, Newfoundland and Norway. The austral summer 1980-1981 campaign studied and experimented the zone. The next one brought back fish. For example the reader can follow Zélande 2 from France to the Austral Ocean via the Suez Canal.

After the First World War Central and Eastern European countries were a geopolitical mess. In Siberia - the Asian parts of Russia - too: the British and French were helping the fight against the Bolcheviks... And it wasn't beautiful: French general Maurice Janin was sent to command the Czeckoslavak Legion that was in Russia at the time... and it seems it ended participating in the demise of a White Russian leader in Omsk.

Money was a problem in Civil War Russia: Imperial roubles still printed by the Bolcheviks were competing in the hands of the people with the Kerenski overturned government new roubles... In Omsk the White Russian authority was considering a sovereign issue of notes.

Like the British in Arkhangelsk, the French government wished to reassure the population with whom their military would have to trade. The Banque de l'Indo-Chine was ordered to open an agency in Vladivostock and issue banknotes in rouble, exchangeable in French francs (1 rouble for 60 centimes).

In 1919 the American Banknote Company was ordered to design and print the notes. But the military and political contingencies in Omsk delayed their issue. In the end they were destroyed in May 1920 in New York... but for specimen series that have been circulating on the market or that are stored in the Banque de l'Indo-Chine archives.